The head of NOAA’s space weather office used a recent hearing to caution that a failure of an aging spacecraft in the next few years could leave the agency “hurting a little bit” in its ability to monitor solar activity.

A space weather and Earth observation satellite that has been offline for more than three months could be restored to normal operations with new software, but that fix is not expected to be completed until early next year.

A pair of technical problems, one with the launch vehicle and the other with the range, postponed the scheduled Feb. 8 launch of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a space and Earth sciences satellite by at least one day.